World

Edward Snowden: Unencrypted Email Isn't Safe

According to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, you should assume that no email is safe, especially if it's not encrypted.

"I was surprised to realize that there were people in news organizations who didn’t recognize any unencrypted message sent over the Internet is being delivered to every intelligence service in the world," Snowden told Peter Maass, a freelance journalists who profiled filmmaker Laura Potrais for the New York Times Magazine. (Potrais, along with The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, is one of the journalists Snowden initially contacted.)

Snowden, who is in an undisclosed location in Russia, the country that gave him temporary asylum, especially criticized journalist who don't use secure means of communicating with their sources.

"In the wake of this year’s disclosures, it should be clear that unencrypted journalist-source communication is unforgivably reckless," he told Maass over encrypted chat.

Last week, Lavabit, an encrypted email service allegedly used by Snowden, decided to shut down after refusing to release information to the government. And Silent Circle, a company that provides encryption apps, preemptively shut down its email service for fear it was vulnerable to surveillance.

"All those things are really, really sensitive information that governments can use to pinpoint and track you, and know who you're communicating with and where you're at and what time," he added.

Even Philip Zimmermann, the inventor of the popular encryption software PGP, and co-founder of Silent Cirlce, isn't an email user anymore. "I don’t use email that much anymore," he told Forbes.

Snowden has touted the importance of encryption before.

"Encryption works," he said in a Q&A with The Guardian. "Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on."

After talking with Snowden, Maass now believes encryption is important as well. In an interview with Poynter, the journalist said he uses it now, and that "everyone needs to use encryption a lot more (it’s not that hard, really) and Tor."

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